Weaving Money: The Art of Libby Harmor

By the time most people encounter shredded money, it’s in a novelty bag from the U.S. Mint—a curiosity, not a medium. But for Sacramento artist Libby Harmor, those thin strips of destroyed currency became the unlikely foundation of a singular art form she calls *money weaving*.

Her discovery was an accident. In the mid-1990s, Harmor was making handmade paper when she spotted shredded money in a catalog. She ordered a batch, imagining it would add depth to her pulp. It didn’t. “The paper didn’t come out right,” she recalls with a shrug. Undeterred, she tried spinning the strips into yarn. That didn’t work either.

Then she reached for a piece of window screen. Its 1/16-inch grid turned out to be a perfect match for the fragments, each one the same width and just over six inches long. By snipping one end of a strip into a tiny arrow, Harmor could guide it through the screen’s holes, in and out like thread. “It’s kind of like needlepoint,” she says, “but without the needle.”

The effect was mesmerizing, though slow. Completing a single square inch could take an hour, much of it spent sifting through piles of shredded bills to find just the right piece. “Money weaving is a way for me to focus,” she explains. “The distractions of every day disappear when I’m working.”

If the act of weaving shredded currency sounds eccentric, it’s emblematic of Harmor’s artistic life. She has never been confined to one discipline. Over the decades she has worked in paper-making, sculpture, ceramics, set design, window dressing, and costume creation—often for children’s theater productions, which she found “more fun.” For more than 25 years she has also run a workshop for ceramic artists, while her alter ego “Auntie Libby” of the Crafty Aunties has encouraged kids to dive into creativity with open-ended play. Between 2005 and 2010, she built museum exhibits for the Effie Yeaw Nature Center, bringing natural history to life through immersive displays.

Her own history began in Marysville, California, before the family moved to the smaller town of Corning, where her father worked as the local undertaker and their home stood next to the mortuary. “I have no idea if that had any influence on my art,” she says with a laugh.

Art, however, has always been central. Harmor earned two degrees in studio art—“not art history, art,” she emphasizes—and picked up her first award in 1957. The most recent came in 2012, a span that speaks to both her longevity and her refusal to stop experimenting.

Now in her seventies, she lives in a converted country church outside Sacramento. Two cats keep her company indoors, while chickens, ducks, and sheep roam outside. Surrounded by both solitude and life, she continues to make something new every day. Ceramics occupy much of her current attention; they allow her to move faster than the intricate, painstaking weavings. Still, the money pieces remain her most distinctive creations: fragments of discarded currency given new value as textured, layered works of art.

“I enjoy making stuff,” Harmor says simply. “But I really enjoy people—meeting them, and their dogs.”

In that spirit, her work feels less like a solitary craft than an invitation: a reminder that art can transform the overlooked, the ordinary, even the once-valuable scraps of money, into something worth far more than the sum of its parts.

~ Al Zagofsky